What started out as a daunting undertaking turned into a fulfilling endeavor and oft-requested end product. After staring at the stack of audience development research on my desk, I finally decided to turn it into something useful: an Annotated Bibliography of Audience Development Resources. 

I say it all the time, but it bears repeating: Our society has changed – dramatically – over the past few decades. We talk about it all the time in the context of business (flattening), government and politics (opening) and community (connecting). 

Not long ago, I attended the presentation of a fellow audience researcher, who put in numbers what we have known already for a long time: there is a negative growth of current audiences in the next generations. This means that in the near future there will be fewer people who fit the profile of current arts audiences. In other words, we are running out of audiences who look like the ones we are engaging now.

As an industry, the arts suffers from a value problem.This was thrown into sharp relief for me in an interview I had with an artistic leader from rural Wisconsin, who pointed out, “We’re all bean counters because the people we deal with, what they count is beans.” In almost everything we do to advocate for the arts, we place financial worth front and center, and in so doing we allow, even encourage, the people we’re trying to convince of a

If we can’t make our existing patrons happy, we might shortly find ourselves with a more urgent need to find new ones.

QR codes are fast becoming more and more common and they are a perfect (and FREE) tool for arts organizations to engage audiences.  

Recently I converged with more than 600 other arts marketers in San Jose during the National Arts Marketing Project Conference. We arrived eager to share with one another examples of how we are engaging our audiences, how we are communicating our messages, how we are raising money, and how we are using technology to do it.